February 26, 2015

Brand, Bullshit & Beyond

Lately, the Ad Contrarian blog has been breaking all kinds of attendance records.

In
trying to analyze the reason for this sudden popularity, I've noticed
something. People seem to love posts with the word "bullshit" in the
title.

Being the kind of guy who likes to give the
customers what they want, from now on every post title will contain the
word "bullshit." I think this is what CMOs call "best
practices."

Last week, I really gave it to the "Global CEO" of a huge ad agency concerning a video he did in which he invoked the genius of Steve Jobs for his own purposes -- and got it 100% wrong.

The guy was lecturing on his theory called "Why Your Brand Is More Important Than Your Product" which, of course, is the constant mantra of the world's professional brand babblers. To bolster his theory he invoked the name of Steve Jobs and proclaimed that the reason for Steve's great success was that he, too, put brand first.

Only problem was that Mr. Global was absolutely, positively, laughably wrong. In fact, Steve was such a believer in the power of the product, that according to Allison Johnson, his VP of Worldwide Marketing, at Apple "brand" was a "dirty word" and Steve "dreaded, hated" the word branding.Now we get an equally powerful repudiation of the misrepresentations of this global loudmouth, this time from the man who was closest to Steve at Apple, Jony Ive.

Here are some quotes from the piece juxtaposed with some of the assertions of Mr. Global.

Steve Jobs: "If I had a spiritual partner at Apple, it's Jony. Jony and I think up most of the products together and then pull the others in and say 'Hey, what do you think about this?' He gets the big picture as well as the most infinitesimal details about each product. And he understands that Apple is a product company."

Global CEO: "Product first, I think, is very retro and very 1980's."

Jony Ive: "I can't emphasize enough: I think there's something really very special about how practical we are. And you could, depending on your vantage point, describe it as old school and traditional, or you could describe it as very effective."

Global CEO: (About Jobs) He started with an idea that consumers want to be bespoke...and he
back-filled into a product

Ive: "We put the product ahead of everything else."

Don't you love it? There is so much bullshit in our
business. Most of it arrives in the form of an opinion or an
anecdote. Consequently, it is very hard to actually catch a bullshitter red-handed like this.

I don't know why this thrills me so much, but it does. Despite all my tantrums, I really do feel deeply about the ad business and I'm sick at heart from watching it being diminished and dismantled by financial manipulators and insufferable blowhards.

I'm also completely fucking tired of these over-fed meatballs undermining the credibility of our industry with their trite, cunning theories and pompous pronouncements.

16 comments:

Ah, yes. And the sad part is that, in spite of being utterly and completely wrong on this entire "analysis," this person will still receive an pants-shittingly huge bonus at the end of the year. This is the CEO from Dilbert in the flesh. What a fuckwit.

This blowhard began his bullshit in New Zealand as a beer marketer. He single-handedly managed to alienate the nation from rugby which had been to that point a religion through nothing other than performance on the field. Fortunately they cottoned on and distanced him. Then he tried again through adidas. It lasted only until people realised they were being ripped off through product pricing. Thankfully thereafter he left to become a blight on America.

Arhh yeah but the clever cognitive behavioural scientists' have theories (that show in general how stupid people) that are now creeping into agency presentations.

Which is handy because they two should get on quite well, they both see people / consumers are irrational zombies.

And they'd say something like this to you, Bob, "Well you would say that wouldn't you Mr Ex Science Teacher but really all you are doing (as is Jobs and Ive too in their bullshit world I assume) post rationalising so it looks like Apple are a product company but that is just naive.

People buy emotionally and brands are emotional and so people just post rationalise their behaviours so they look rational when really they acting emotionally i.e. at the brand level.

They talk as if a brand could exists with no bloody product at all. It is as if they are contemplating the mind body problem.

Your despite for bullshit is laudable, but consider that Jobs was capable of affirming something and its very opposite with equal conviction. For instance, in this case he celebrates Nike because it doesn't focus its communication on product: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keCwRdbwNQY

And he does so introducing "Think different": quite ironic considering thatJony Ive complains about too many companies obsessed with doing something different and not enough with doing something better.

In retrospect, we can say that what Jobs says in the video is very different from what he went on to do later.

"Caustic Yet Truthful"

"The Most provocative Man In Advertising"

"Savage Critiques Of Digital Hype"

"Fabulously Irreverent"

CONTACT BOB

Over 60,000 people have watched Bob's talk at Advertising week, Europe

You Are Caller Number...

Click Image

Ad Contrarian Says:

"Creative people make the ads. Everyone else makes the arrangements."

"Delusional thinking isn't just acceptable in marketing today -- it's mandatory.""Good ads appeal to us as consumers. Great ads appeal to us as humans."

"Social Media: Tens of millions of disagreeable people looking to make trouble."

"As an ad medium, the web is a much better yellow pages and a much worse television."

"Sometimes success in the advertising business is about sitting quietly and letting clients proceed with their hysterical delusions."

"Marketers prefer precise answers that are wrong to imprecise answers that are right."

"Brand studies last for months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and generally have less impact on business than cleaning the drapes."

"The idea that the same consumer who was frantically clicking her TV remote to escape from advertising was going to merrily click her mouse to interact with it is going to go down as one of the great advertising delusions of all time."

"Nobody really knows what "creativity" is. Every year thousands of people take a pilgrimage to find out. This involves flying to Cannes, snorting cocaine, and having sex with smokers."

"Marketers habitually overestimate the attraction of new things and underestimate the power of traditional consumer behavior."

"We don’t get them to try our product by convincing them to love our brand. We get them to love our brand by convincing them to try our product."

"In American business, there is nothing stupider than the previous generation of management."

"If the message is right, who cares what screen people see it on? If the message is wrong, what difference does it make?"

"The only form of product information on the planet less trustworthy than advertising is the shrill ravings of web maniacs."

"There's no bigger sucker than a gullible marketer convinced he's missing a trend."

"All ad campaigns are branding campaigns. Whether you intend it to be a branding campaign is irrelevant. It will create an impression of your brand regardless of your intent."

"Nobody ever got famous predicting that things would stay pretty much the same."